Twitter enables the open exchange real-time information with the world in quick, frequent messaging. This is exactly what makes Twitter great, but also challenging for marketing. How does a company or brand stand out?
Hashtags are the main way for people to find what they are looking for. Putting the pound, or hash, symbol in front of a word or group of words (without spaces) makes it a searchable link. This helps organize content and allows users to better filter their searches using the hashtag keywords.
First, there are the broad topic hashtags that are obvious subject search terms.
#IT
#technology
#tech
#cloud
#broadband
#data
#datacenter
#infosec
#cybercrime
#cybersecurity
Within these, you might drill down further into more specific areas of interest. Such as:
#authentication
#compliance
#CIO
#privacy
#ITsecurity
#BYOD
#cloudcomputing
#healthIT
#ethernet
#sharepoint
#voip
#Virtualization
#broadband
#fiberoptic
#voip
More Useful Tools
With the help of a site such as hashtagify.me you can also find popular related tags to the one you’re already following.
So, for instance, typing in #bigdata also nets the often used tags #analytics, #IoT, #InternetofThings, #cloud, #MachineLearning, #M2M, #tech and #Hadoop
Or, trying #cloudcomputing brings up #cloud, #BigData, #DevOps, #IT, #IoT, #SaaS and more.
Another tool to help you be heard is ritetag.com. The site color grades the level of engagement for hashtags with green representing good engagement and Tweet density, red demonstrating overused tags (sure, it’s trending but your chances of getting seen are slim), and more.
Of course, armed with all of this information, you still only have 140 characters, so don’t go overboard. Don’t know what we mean by that? Check out Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s #hashtag dialogue.
Take your intelligent list of IT hashtags and use these to enhance your social monitoring. Want to know more about that? It’s coming up soon.